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Tuesday 19 March 2024

As Eurozone concerns have dominated risk appetite within the market this year, a key question that faces many market participants is how to capture some of the attractive risk premiums that this weakness creates without exposing themselves unduly to the significant “tail risks” of a full blown Euro death spiral.

In this vein, a popular trade in recent months has been to add exposure to the US high yield market. The rationale is fairly simple (and one that we agree with): The US high yield market is trading at reasonably cheap levels, yielding 8.6% with a spread over treasuries of 754bps*. Yet at the same time the US economy is performing much better than Europe, its government can borrow cheaply and you don’t suffer from all the inherent tail risks of the European markets.

There is no doubt that issuers within the European high yield market are exposed to the economic headwinds that the Eurozone has created. However, is it fair to label the market as one that is riven with tail risks? We’d argue it isn’t.

The chart below splits the high yield market into different regions according to the geographic centre of gravity for each issuer. “Core Europe” encompasses German, French, Dutch, Austrian and any other current Eurozone country that has avoided the “Peripheral” tag. This area, arguably less exposed to true tail risk events (i.e. a Spanish and/or Italian exit from the Euro) accounts for just under half of the market at 47.58%. The “Peripheral Europe” issuers, or the real “tail risk” within the market, accounts for around 16% at current trading levels. Let’s put this another way:  84% of the market is not directly exposed to a major tail risk event.

Probably more surprising is the proportion of the market that operates entirely outside of the Eurozone. Taken together, Western European Non Euro (i.e. UK, Swiss, Swedish, Norwegian issuers), Eastern European, North American, South African and Asia Pacific issuers account for a little over 36% of the market.

Also, when we focus on the European map of issuance below, the country by country specifics of the market are easier to determine. Taken together German, French and British issuers account for 51% of the market.

The point is this – there is no doubt that there are many risks within the European high yield market (volatility, economic headwinds, the likelihood of rising default rates), but we believe there are still many pockets of opportunity where investors can capture some attractive risk premia without directly exposing themselves to catastrophic European “tail risks”.

*Source: Bloomberg, Merrill Lynch US High Yield Master II Index, 20th December 2011

Yesterday I wrote a comment about how US Treasuries seemed to have decoupled from US economic data, and decided that it must be all about Europe (see here).  That could have been a slightly hasty conclusion.

Having spent the last few minutes messing around with Treasury correlations, I was surprised to find just how closely correlated US Treasury yields have been with Chinese equities since the beginning of 2009.  Mounting fears about the extent of the slowdown in China saw the Shanghai Composite Index hit the lowest level since March 2009 last week.  It’s also interesting to note that while Eurozone economic data has stabilised and US economic data has massively surprised on the upside, Asia Pacific as a region appears to be getting worse.  The Citigroup Economic Surprise Index for Asia Pacific shows that data in the region is currently underperforming analyst expectations by the most since the end of April 2009.    For those interested, Paul Krugman wrote an interesting piece on the deteriorating picture in China in the New York Times earlier this week (see here).  As Krugman rounded off in his piece, the last thing the world economy needs is a new epicentre of crisis.

Alternatively, if you want to see an argument about why economic surprise data is meaningless then see here.

Without further comment, we give you the eight songs that each of the team would take to a desert island.  In keeping with the spirit of the radio show, we have also given them the Complete Works of the Smiths, and a copy of Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money.

Stefan Isaacs
Pearl Jam – Alive
Foo Fighters – Pretender
White Stripes – Seven Nation Army
Beatles – Hey Jude
Oasis – Rock n Roll Star
Eminem – Lose Yourself
Radiohead – Karma Police
Guns n Roses – You Could be Mine

Ben Lord
Bob Marley – Could you be Loved
ACDC – Back in Black
Guns n Roses – Sweet Child O Mine
Rolling Stones – Gimme Shelter
Underworld – Everything Everything
Kings of Leon – The Bucket
Arctic Monkeys – From the Ritz to the Rubble
Chemical Brothers – We Are the Night

Jim Leaviss
Echo and the Bunnymen – The Cutter
Morrissey – Now My Heart is Full
Spacemen 3 – Hypnotised
Frankie Knuckles & Jamie Principle – Your Love
Happy Mondays – Do It Better
My Bloody Valentine – Soon
KLF – Wichita Lineman Was A Song I Once Heard
Donna Summer – I Feel Love

James Thompson
Frankie Knuckles ft. Robert Owens – Tears
Liberty City – If you really love someone
Primal Scream – Don’t fight it, feel it
The Awesome 3 – Don’t go
Stone Roses – She bangs the drums
Lectroluv Remix Project – Dream drums
Norma Jean Bell – Love’s got its hooks in me
Hardfloor – Acperience 1

Stuart Liddle
Undertones – Teenage kicks
Elvis Presley – Unchained Melody
The Offspring – Smash
Marilyn Manson – Sweet Dreams
Nirvana – Lounge Act
Eminem – Almost Famous
Oasis – Little by little
Rolling Stones – Start me up

Filippo Fabbris
Kissin – Rachmaninov – Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor, Op. 18
Coldplay – Everything’s Not Lost
IAM – Demain C’est Loin
Raphael & Jean-Louis Aubert – Sur la Route
Slayer – Raining Blood
Empire of the Sun – We are the People
David Bowie – Cat People
Pietro Mascagni – Cavelleria Rusticana

Gordon Harding
Stevie Wonder – Another Star
NWA – 100 Miles and Runnin
Radiohead – All I Need
Massive Attack – Three
Aphex Twin – Ageispolis
Placebo – You Don’t Care About Us
The Pump Panel – Ego Acid
Urban Shakedown – Arsonist

Matthew Russell
Jay-Z & Eminem – Renegade
Michael Jackson – PYT
N.E.R.D – Rock Star
The Libertines – Time for Heroes
Dizzie Rascal – Imagine
The Verve – Sonnet
Notorious BIG – Juicy
Arctic Monkeys – Do me a favour

Tamara Burnell
ELO – Diary of Horace Wimp
The Jackson 5 – I Want You Back
The Doors – Touch me
Elvis Costello – Oliver’s Army
Aretha Franklin – Respect
Elton John – Goodbye Yellow Brick Road
Billy Joel – Scenes from an Italian Restaurant
Meatloaf – Paradise by the Dashboard Light

James Tomlins
Muse – Knights of Cydonia
Dire Straits – Money for Nothing
Beethoven – Ode to Joy
Jay Z – 99 Problems
Massive Attack – Unfinished Symphony
Led Zepplin – Whole Lotta Love
Guns n Roses – Welcome to the Jungle
Dizee Rascal – Fix Up, Look Sharp.

Richard Woolnough
Toploader – Dancing in the Moonlight
Dire Straights – Sultans of Swing
Kenny Loggins – Danger Zone
Pulp – Sorted for E’s & Wizz
Bryan Adams – The Only Thing That Looks Good On Me is You
Murray Head – One Night in Bangkok
Steve Miller Band – Abracadabra
Chris Rea – Road to Hell (Part Two)

Mike Riddell
Pixies – Where is my Mind
Amadou & Mariam – Sabali
Toto – Africa
Weezer -Say it ain’t so
REM –  Shiny Happy People
Foo Fighters – Everlong
Kings of Convenience – Manhattan Skyline
The Stranglers – Golden Brown

Anthony Doyle
Johnny Cash – San Quentin
The Highwaymen – Highwayman
Bruce Springsteen – Dancing in the Dark
Cold Chisel – Bow River
Jeff Buckley – Lover You Should’ve Come Over
Carl Orff – O Fortuna
The Pogues – And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda
Van Morrison – Sweet Thing

Jason Gish
Yazoo – Don’t Go
Belouis Some – Imagination
The Undertones – Here comes the Summer
The Jam – Billy Hunt
Mussorgsky – Night on a Bare Mountain
Dizzee Rascal / Florence and the Machine – You got the Dirtee Love
The Ramones – Sheena is a Punk Rocker
The Beatles – The Ballad of John and Yoko

Markus Peters
Jimi Hendrix – All along the watchtower
Die Hoehner – Viva Colonia
Coldplay – Green Eyes
Peter Fox – Haus am See
Clueso – Chicago
Barry Manilow – Copacabana (Gordo Gordito Remix)
Jan Delay – Klar
Westernhagen – Sexy

NB: Richard Woolnough’s are purely guesses as he was out of the office when we put it together.

Government bond investing used to be about analysing and assessing economic data.  Judging by the last few months, not any more.

At the beginning of June, I argued here that US economic data was a horror show and was falling off a cliff, and bond investors (and risk assets generally) seemed not to have noticed.   The chart I posted back in June stoked quite a bit of reaction, with the main points of contention being that (1) government bonds would surely sell off as inflation rose; (2) government bonds would surely sell off as sovereign debt levels rose; (3) the weaker economic data was due to the Tsunami on March 11th and would prove temporary; (4) there was a risk of a US downgrade as S&P had put the US credit rating on negative outlook in April; (5) it’s not accurate to compare a surprise index to an absolute yield level (fair point, although the close historical correlation suggested that Treasuries should have rallied at least a bit given how bad the data had been); and (6) US economic surprise indices have never stayed negative for long, so given the index was already so low, Treasuries were about to sell off lots as the data improved.

Anti-bond sentiment reached a peak in early July, when JP Morgan’s weekly US Treasury client survey revealed that zero clients were positioned long duration (i.e. positioned for a Treasury rally), which was the first time this had been the case since February 2005 and only the third time in the survey’s 20 year history.   Anyway, what with Spanish and Italian government bonds coming under renewed pressure in June and all the European stuff we’ve talked about over the past few years, it felt like AAA rated sovereign bonds were ripe for a rally so I moved long duration (a position I’ve run ever since although the reasons have slightly changed).

Curious things have been going on since August.  US Treasury yields finally did enjoy a big rally from early August once the market realised that S&P’s decision to downgrade the US wasn’t going to prompt a wave of forced sellers. But from early August, the US economic surprise line started edging upwards (so those who said economic surprise indices don’t stay very negative for very long were eventually correct).  Initially I suspect this improvement was simply due to the index being a 3 month moving average, and a lot of the bad data from May was dropping out, although there’s no question that US data has been genuinely stronger since the beginning of October.  The improving trend has been maintained, and a couple of weeks ago the 8 year old index hit a level that had only been exceeded for a few days in November/December 2003 and in the week immediately prior to the tsunami in March this year.

Eurozone data has been improving versus expectations lately too, although it is worth emphasising that Eurozone economic data is far from great, it’s just that the markets are now fully pricing in a mild recession so are no longer being ‘surprised’.  Just as with Treasuries, 10 year German government bond yields are not far off recent record lows.

The reason for sustained ultra low government bond yields, rather obviously, is the ongoing mess in Europe.  Government bond yields are more about the market trying to price the tail risk that the market may not exist in a recognisable form in a few months.  Perhaps related to this, low Treasury yields are also reflecting the risk (likelihood) that most of the European rated sovereigns and various supranationals that are currently rated AAA will very soon cease to be rated AAA. The end to European AAA ratings would surely accelerate the ongoing credit/collateral crunch as investors scramble for the few remaining safe haven assets.

If you’re still long of government bonds and expect them to rally (like me), then you have to be expecting the situation in Europe to deteriorate further.  If the situation improves, then the recent flow of economic data leaves government bonds looking very vulnerable.

Thank you for another bumper haul of Christmas Quiz entries.  This year’s winner is Dan Looney, with 20/20.  Dan will be familiar to those M&G clients in the South West of the UK, as he used to cover that region for us a decade or so ago when he worked here.  He was genuinely first out of the hat – the others in the full house club are Richard Sullivan, Sam Morton, Mark Dufton and Nick Tudball.  Also winners, and on 19/20, are Simon Evan-Cook, Jonathan Peberdy, Andrew Mann, Adam Weidner, Gary Lee, and Chris Ramsden.  The best M&G entry was from Dominic Harlow, 19/20.

Dan gets to chose a charity for us to make a £200 donation to (we’ll tweet it @bondvigilantes when he’s told us), and we’ll be in touch with the rest of you to get your addresses so we can send you a copy of Michael Lewis’s Boomerang.

The answers are below.  For question 8, we also accepted Running Man, or Batman and Robin (also Arnie/Jesse films).  We accepted both 15 or 16 for question number 18, as it depends on whether you think Hong Kong is a sovereign nation or not.

  1. The picture is of Glenn Burke, formerly of the Oakland As baseball team.  The hand signal he invented was the “high five”.
  2. The only member of the Smiths to have a UK number 1 single, was Craig Gannon (who was in the Smiths in 1986).  Previously he had been a member of the Bluebells, and Young at Heart was number one for 4 weeks in 1993 when it was reissued after being used in a VW advert.  There was a moment of panic when someone claimed that Andy Rourke played on Sinead O’Connor’s Nothing Compares 2 U – but we couldn’t evidence that (he did play on some of her records), and it wouldn’t have impacted the result.
  3. Hammersmith & Fulham has 3 Premier League football clubs within it – QPR, Fulham and Chelsea.
  4. Brian Binnie won the X Prize in 2004 by piloting SpaceShipOne, the first private manned vehicle, into space.
  5. Wenlock and Mandeville are the 2012 Olympic mascots.
  6. Peter Auty sang “Walking in the Air” in the film The Snowman (Aled Jones sang it for a record release).
  7. Bluetooth technology is named after a Danish Viking king.
  8. The film Predator features two future US Governors – Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jesse Ventura.
  9. The picture shows the gravestone of Tony Wilson, Factory Records boss.
  10. We are the Champions by Queen was determined to be the catchiest song of all time, according to scientists at Goldsmiths University this year.  YMCA came second.
  11. The Power of Love charted 3 times in 1985 with different versions by Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Huey Lewis and the News, and Jennifer Rush.
  12. The picture shows the bike that Eddy Merckx used to break the hour record.
  13.  A neutrino may have travelled faster than light between Switzerland and Italy in an experiment earlier this year.
  14.  An email which may have implicated senior newspaper executives in the phone hacking scandal was titled “For Neville”.
  15. The picture is what the new ECB headquarters in Frankfurt will look like when it’s finished, unless they decide they don’t need so much space going forward.
  16. Rooster is the character played by Mark Rylance in the hit play, Jerusalem.
  17. They were the first names of the Republican Party presidential nominee candidates at the time that we published the quiz.
  18. There are still 16 AAA rated sovereign nations, according to S&P.  Australia, Austria, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Finland, France, Hong Kong, Norway, Netherlands, Liechtenstein. Luxembourg, Singapore, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom.
  19. The diagram is Charles Minard’s Map of Napoleon’s Russian Campaign of 1812 (overlaying a Sankey diagram onto a geographical map).
  20. The President of the Italian Football Association urged Serie A football players to buy Italian government bonds as a patriotic duty.

Thanks again for all the entries, and Happy Christmas to everyone.  I think we’ll post the bond team’s Desert Island Discs next week, but apart from that, it’ll be quietish here until 2012.

The decorations are up, the presents are under the tree, and I’m starting to think of New Year resolutions. Yes 2012 is almost upon us. With that in mind, I thought it might be interesting to have a quick look at who have been the winners and losers in debt markets over the course of an eventful 2011.

As the below chart shows, investors in UK gilts have had a fantastic year. The top performing area of the bond market has been inflation-linked gilts which have provided a fantastic return of 16% to investors, despite the Bank of England’s quantitative easing programme not targeting this area of the market. Investors have sought the protection of inflation-linked assets in a horrible year for the Bank of England where inflation has hovered around the 5% mark due to higher commodity prices and tax increases. UK and German government bonds have generated great returns for investors due to the increase in risk aversion that has characterised markets since the summer.

At the other end of the scale, investors in Italian inflation-linked government bonds have suffered a loss of almost 15% due to solvency concerns surrounding the Italian government and the fear that Italy is entering into a prolonged recession as fiscal austerity measures begin to kick in.

Investment grade corporate bonds have had a solid year but it is important to define returns for non-financial and financial corporates. Non-financial credit has been the place to be, with Sterling non-financials up around 9% end EMU non-financials up 2% (a good result considering concerns around the growth outlook for Europe). Financials have lost ground this year, particularly European financials. Investors in peripheral and subordinated financial debt have had a terrible year. If you did own financial assets, senior debt outperformed subordinated debt by around 10%.

As expected, high yield markets have suffered as expectations that default rates would increase due to the global economic slowdown with European and Sterling high yield both losing 3.4%. That said, high yield markets have performed relatively well when one considers that the European and UK equity markets are down around 20% and 8% respectively this year. US high yield has generated a positive return for investors this year of 3% due to less chance of a recession in the US and relatively low leverage levels for US high yield businesses. The general view is that the US is a lot more advanced than both Europe and the UK in dealing with its anaemic growth outlook through aggressive and unconventional central bank monetary policy actions.

In the emerging market space, EM credit denominated in US dollars has done well and so has EM sovereign credit. Emerging markets have benefitted from substantial capital inflows over the last few years and certainly this is a trend that we are keeping a close eye on. A reversal of the huge capital inflows into EM debt would result in a total lack of liquidity and significantly higher borrowing costs for emerging market countries.

We are interested in hearing which fixed interest asset class our readers think will be the top performer in 2012, so please feel free to nominate your choice in the comments box below.

I went to Asia a couple of weeks ago to try to get away from the Eurozone and maintain some semblance of sanity, and to try to figure out what’s going on in the continent that has driven global economic growth in recent years.

Escaping the Eurozone crisis was of course impossible, since the fact is that Asian ‘decoupling’ is a myth and the Eurozone is the most obvious source of a global economic slowdown. Asia is, after all, an export driven cyclical economy as a whole.

Nevertheless, I did come away with slightly differing views from those held beforehand, while some views were reaffirmed. I’m marginally more comfortable with Chinese property over the short to medium term (note that ‘more comfortable’ is very different to saying ‘comfortable’), while there are a number of risks that I feel don’t get sufficient attention. Things like Asia’s reliance on trade finance provided by the rapidly deleveraging European banks have been getting more sell side attention and press coverage since I returned, although alarming signs of capital flight from a number of Asian countries, including China, still haven’t. There is still a prevailing belief that countries that are running current account surpluses and have large FX reserves are somehow immune from flights to quality, but this is untrue (indeed you only need to look at Russia in 2008 to see that significant capital flight can still occur to an extent that places the domestic banking sector under extreme stress).  I’ve talked previously on our blog about  what I believe to be a great risk to EM and Asia in particular in terms of ‘hot money’ and ‘real money’ capital outflows (see here on how EM debt is the new ‘big short’), and evidence of recent capital outflows strengthens this view.

There’s a lot of emphasis on China in the short video I recorded below, but this is only natural when you consider that China has been behind about a third of global growth in the last few years, and its economy is at least as big as the rest of Asia put together (indeed, in the last year, China’s economy has grown by the size of roughly another Indonesia).  And apologies for the sound quality in parts, I’m not sure what possessed me to film myself with jumbo jets landing over my shoulder.  Our digital team here have insisted on putting me on a training course.

It’s over 4 years since the financial crisis began, and by now you would have thought that we would understand all the factors that drove the building of, and since 2007, the destruction of the foundations of world economic growth. Over the last few weeks the events have been analysed by a series of economic programmes on the BBC.

Not surprisingly, many of the players, the mistakes, the events and the dramas were plain to see, especially with the benefit of hindsight. From a bond holder’s point of view, we knew that companies could be opportunistic, rating agencies conflicted, and regulators under-resourced. These themes played out through the course of this week’s programmes.

One programme, however, the Oscar winning Inside Job, brought to light my continued naivety with the help of some of their cleverly edited sound bites.

A particularly interesting section of the film was dedicated to examining the academic profession. I naively thought that the point of academia was to study, develop arguments, and search for the truth. George Soros (1hr 19mins into the film) sees things slightly differently – “Deregulation had tremendous financial and intellectual support because people argued it for their own benefit…..the economics profession was the main source of that illusion”.

You obviously expect some bias with economics and the study of the financial system, whether it’s the economic arguments leading the political arguments (or vice versa) from both the left and the right. However what I had missed was the conflict of interest that frames the whole economic and regulatory debate.

The carousel of regulators, politicians and academics was something that had previously passed me by. The intellectual framework for regulation was heavily influenced by sponsorship of academia by interested parties. An example of this was where a professor (and ex central banker) had been paid to write a financial report on the stability of the Icelandic financial system by the Icelandic Chamber of Commerce. The report that he was paid in excess of $100,000 to write came out favourably; unfortunately reality did not. Events always appear clearer with hindsight. Mind you, the CV of the economist who wrote the glowing report on Iceland may have benefitted from hindsight more than it really should have. A “typo” appears to have occurred at some point which changed its title from a report on stability to one examining the instability of the system (1hr 24mins in).

Now we as investors know the conflict that rating agencies may face when rating the firm that pays the fee, but had not spotted who else was conflicted.

Why should we care? Well sadly it means the system is weaker than we thought.  The politicians and regulators look for independent analysis from academia to drive us forward, however that analysis may well be severely conflicted. To get rich quick, the academics, central bankers and regulators have an interest to keep filling the punchbowl, as they too are drinking from it.

The supposed benefit of appointing professors to run central banks is the concept that we are getting independent, intelligent individuals who have the ‘general good’ as their goal – a type of benevolent dictator. Maybe, however, part of their rise through academia came through the money that Wall Street threw at themselves, their departments and their universities.

The thing that amused me most in the interviews with these potentially conflicted economists was that they had trouble understanding where the conflict of interest lay (1hr 22mins). If any profession should know how incentives work then surely it is the economists.

If the intellectual and political establishments are too beholden to the system they are meant to control then we have yet another new problem to add to the list. What else will we learn next year?

Last week saw Citigroup’s credit conference & an opportunity for investors to catch up with a number of European high yield issuers. For a number of companies the message continues to be one of uncertainty, not least with regard to their banking relationships.

Back in 2008 Richard & I blogged about companies drawing down on bank lines (see here). Companies like CIT were doing so as they were finding it increasingly difficult to fund, whilst the likes of Porsche saw an opportunity borrow cheaply and then deposit the funds at a higher rate.

It seems once again companies are looking to draw down committed facilities. However, rather than being born out of an individual company’s distress, the catalyst seems to be the waning confidence in the banking system. At the very point in time when banks are finding it more difficult to fund their balance sheets and to deleverage, they risk seeing companies call on committed lines, which by their nature are not fully funded.

Which leads nicely into the Tuesday’s annual Sovereign and Financial System Review conducted by our financials team. The meeting focussed on the debunking of myths we feel broadly remain common place amongst investors.

Whilst the substance of the meeting is outside the scope of any one blog, and merely listing the myths taken out of context, I figured  it was a worthwhile exercise anyhow to list those myths that have been debunked over the last 12 months or so, as well as those that continue to circulate:

The myths that are being debunked:

  • No more banks will be allowed to go bust
  • Banks have deleveraged already
  • Banks have already restructured
  • National champion banks will be fine
  • Covered bonds are bullet proof
  • Supra and agency bonds are ‘guaranteed’
  • It’s ok, there’s a bail out fund
  • Germany’s fine- they’ll bail us out
  • Governments will abide by EU treaties
  • Insurance Sector is a ’safe haven’
  • You don’t need to do sovereign analysis
  • Credit analysts can’t do sovereign analysis

The myths that are still believed to varying degrees in the market, or that have appeared recently, and give rise to the most discussion around here at the moment, :

  • It’s easy, just look at the debt/GDP ratio (for sovereigns)
  • It’s ok if you have commodity exports
  • It’s ok if most debt held domestically
  • Just look at net external debt
  • Just look at current account deficit
  • Sovereign debt doesn’t need documentation
  • Eurozone breakup is unthinkable
  • Docs or English law prevents redenomination
  • Foreign bonds are in some way better
  • You can work out impact of Eurozone break up
  • Bond lawyers can tell you what you need to know
  • As long as the bank is profitable, it’s ok
  • XYZ bank is highly profitable based on its net interest margin
  • Capital ratios or non-performing loan ratios are an indicator of solvency
  • Leverage ratio (equity/assets) will be the most useful
  • The yield curve determines how banks do
  • Household leverage is an indicator of problems or a lack thereof
  • Some banking sectors are ‘safe havens’
  • Banks have improved their funding profile
  • Banks have increased their deposit bases
  • Banks have lots of collateral available
  • Banks can always raise secured funding or repo
  • Banks have successfully prefunded maturities
  • National champion banks will be fine
  • Government bad bank structures are working
  • Central counterparties eliminate risk of financial defaults
  • Repo market can value corporate bond collateral
  • Repo market increases transparency
  • Collateralisation has reduced counterparty risk
  • “Too big to fail banks” will still get some sort of support
  • Secured debt will be fine
  • Agencies/supranationals are implicitly guaranteed
  • It’s ok, the banks can just go to the ECB for repo
  • National central banks can’t create credit
  • A crisis is a buying opportunity
  • We’re at the bottom, things will rally now
  • Export/investment will recover quickly
  • Asia/rest of the world will bail us all out
  • Countries with own currencies recover quicker

Congratulations to those of you who made it to the end of that list. I imagine you are an elite few!

Here’s the 5th annual Bond Vigilantes quiz.  Twenty questions.  The closing dates for entries is midday on Friday 16th December.  Please email your answers.

Given a doubling of our readership over the last year from 6,000 separate visitors per month to 12,500+ we are more than doubling our prize pool.  However, as it’s all about the glory of victory we will be donating the top prize of £200 to the charity of the winner’s choice.  The winner and the next nine best scores will receive a copy of Michael Lewis’s Boomerang (I just finished it – excellent but pretty depressing).

See below for details of entry.  Good luck – as always you may not need 20/20 to win a prize.

1. Which hand signal did this guy invent?

2. Which member of the Smiths is the only one to have had a UK number 1 hit single?

3. Which borough has the greatest number of UK Barclays Premiership men’s football clubs in it?

4. In October 2004, a man called Brian travelled just under 70 miles to achieve which world record?

5. Who are Wenlock and Mandeville?

6. Who sang “Walking in the Air” in the film The Snowman?

7. Which telecoms innovation is named after a Danish Viking king?

8. What’s the only action film to feature two future US Governors?

9. Who’s gravestone is this?

10. “Scientists” discovered this year that the world’s catchiest song of all time is…?

11. The same song title, three completely different songs, the same year, all charted highly in the UK.  Title of the song?

12. Who’s bicycle was this?

13. What may have broken some pretty important laws in travelling from Switzerland to Italy earlier this year?

14. What was for Neville?

15. What will this (probably) be when it’s finished?

16. Rooster lives in a Wiltshire caravan – which award winning play?

17. What links Michele, Herman, Jon, Gary, Ron, Rick, Mitt, Rick and Newt?

18. As at today’s date, how many AAA rated sovereign nations are there according to S&P?

19. What is this famous diagram showing (broadly)?

20. What did former Italy and Roma midfielder Damiano Tommasi, now President of the Italian Football Association urge Serie A football players to buy on Monday 28th November?

The information we collect from you is used solely to to notify you should you win the competition.

This competition is now closed.

Month: December 2011

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